Evan McMullin hysteria

Evan McMullin has come out of nowhere to lead the presidential polls in Utah and now we’re seeing the beginnings of a weirdly furious backlash. My facebook feed started filling up with so-called exposes of McMullin over the last couple of weeks and I finally got around to reading them.

Spoiler Alert – they’re crap.

Seriously, with headlines blaring pretty major accusations I figured someone had dug up something nefarious in McMullin’s past or some terrible policy position he holds. So when I read these posts I was terribly confused. Where was the smoking gun? Who had Evan murdered or groped? Did he once sponsor a dinner for vehemently pro choice NARAL? In his time in the CIA did he take money from foreign governments?

None of the above. What did these angry McMullin haters find? One post says one time a McMullin advisor said mean things about Donald Trump on twitter. With such a scaremongering headline I expected far more than the nothingburger that post turned out to be.

And why are we suckers? Because of some policy Evan proposed that we wouldn’t actually agree with if we sheeple weren’t so weak-minded? Nope. In a post that promised to give me “the truth about Evan McMullin” there was shockingly little said about Evan McMullin. No policy disagreements, no skeletons in his closet. Instead, it tries to convince me that Donald Trump is going to shake up Washington and give me a conservative Supreme Court.

To which I say, wake up sheeple!

The two major political parties have given us the two most despised presidential candidates in history. The two most untrustworthy presidential candidates in history. Hillary Clinton ran against a nobody socialist and still had a difficult primary because not even Democrats trust her. She literally sold access to the US State Department and made millions. She led one of the most cynical cover ups of a foreign policy disaster I’ve ever seen. She gave the Russian foreign minister a fake reset button (and got the Russian word for reset wrong) months after they had invaded Georgia. They mocked Romney after he said in 2012 that Russia was our number one geopolitical foe, and now they’re freaking out that Russia is, in fact, our number one geopolitical foe. Hillary Clinton was a disaster as Secretary of State and is as corrupt a politician as they come. How democrats could nominate such a dumpster fire is beyond me.

Not to be outdone, Republicans nominated the one person on the planet with higher unfavorables than Hillary. Donald Trump is awful. And don’t give me the tired old “but the Supreme Court!!!1!!” argument. Donald Trump is so incoherent on every major issue that could come before the Court that there is no way any sane person could be confident in who he’ll pick as a Justice. He’s a flake on abortion. He’s terrible on the 2nd Amendment. He’s cheated on all three of his wives and is trying to overtake Bill Clinton as the gropiest man in the White House so I do have a reservation or two about how strong he’ll be on social issues. I know, I’m such a sheeple.

No, in my opinion, there is no good argument for voting for either of these two lying, blowhard, corrupt, dumpster fire candidates for president. I’m a father and my kids know I vote in every election. They ask me who I’m voting for and why. I cannot in good conscience tell them I’m voting for Hillary or Donald. These are two terrible human beings who have no business being on a tour of the White House let alone living there.

I understand that in all likelihood one of these two cretins will be our next president. As far as I’m concerned they’ll both do incredible harm to our country and the world. There is nothing in their pasts or in their campaigning that convinces me they’ll be anything but horrible presidents. Both of them. I’m a Republican who has been a county delegate, state delegate, and state party officer and I don’t see any difference in the level of awful between Hillary and Donald.

So third party it is!

I may have been persuadable to vote Libertarian Party this year, but despite some policy overlap libertarianism isn’t conservatism, and frankly Gary Johnson needs to toke less and learn a foreign leader’s name before I’ll vote for him. But if he’s your thing then more power to you. I won’t judge (very much).

Enter Evan McMullin. He’s well spoken. He knows policy. His positions on abortion, military, education, spending and a host of other policies mostly match mine. In a year like 2016, that’s enough. He’s young, he’s never held elected office and has no voting record to judge him by. He’s been running for all of two months and so hasn’t really been vetted. But let’s be honest, Trump has been running for a year and the media didn’t bother to release its dirt on him until three weeks before the election so my trust level with their vetting abilities is at an all time low.

So Evan isn’t a perfect candidate. But the Republican and Democratic parties have set the bar incredibly low. And the various anti-McMullin blog posts cluttering up my social media feeds are setting it even lower.